Quote

Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate. Still others want to smother you with their sticky charms.

Stanley Kunitz

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Stanley Kunitz
Age: 100 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 29
Died: 2006
Died: May 14
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Worcester
Massachusetts
Stanley Jasspon Kunitz
Approach
Gate
Present
Cliffs
Enclosure
Half
Poems
Snarling
Others
Gates
Smother
Stills
Charm
Climbed
Still
Mets
Sticky
Need
Dog
Charms
Needs
Expect
Defensive

More quotes by Stanley Kunitz

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Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.
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Forward my mail to Mars.
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It is my heart that's late, it is my song that's flown.
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The heart breaks and breaks and lives by breaking it is necessary to go through dark and deeper dark and not to turn
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An old poet ought never to be caught with his technique showing.
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I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
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In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: Live in the layers, not on the litter. Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
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A longing for the dance stirs in the buried life.
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I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.
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Poetry today is easier to write but harder to remember.
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We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
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A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
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The poem comes in the form of a blessing, like rapture breaking on the mind.
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In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
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Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
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Darling, do you remember the man you married? Touch me, remind me who I am.
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The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
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A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
Stanley Kunitz
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To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot be separated from the earth. I come out of the garden every day feeling, oh, inspired in a way that one needs in order to convert the daily-ness of the life into something greater than that little life itself.
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Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.
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